Author challenges 'new atheists' on man's origins

Blogger and researcher Jim Fletcher has worked in the book publishing industry for 15 years, and is now director of the apologetics group Prophecy Matters. His new book, "Truth Wins," provides important analysis of Rob Bell and his Emergent friends.

The iconic (hope he doesn’t mind that description; he’ll at least find it ironic) apologetics teacher has been beset by health problems in recent years, but he is still with us, and his latest book, “Cosmos, Creator and Human Destiny,” is the latest in a long line of thoroughly compelling books. This latest effort is a robust challenge to the worldviews of Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins and what Hunt calls “the new atheists.”

Always a favorite on the Bible prophecy lecture circuit, Hunt’s nimble mind and discernment about the culture lead him to areas beyond predictive prophecy, such as the debate over origins. Frankly, he has always delivered an intellectual component that is sometimes missing from other conservative commentators, and his gravitas today makes him the ideal candidate to take on the rigid dogma of Darwin, Dawkins and friends.

As noted on the book’s jacket copy, physicist Erwin Schrodinger said in the last century that “science knows nothing of … good or bad, God and eternity.” His musing calls to mind a quote I read once from an anonymous Sumerian scribe: “Whence come the evil things everywhere?” He had no more clue about ultimate truth than modern atheistic scientists. Hunt, in “Cosmos, Creator and Human Destiny” writes with authority that it is possible to know truth.

In Chapter 2, “Science Then and Now,” Hunt delivers one of those skewering jabs he’s known for, challenging (like Princeton’s peerless Robert Dick Wilson a century ago often did) atheists to offer something concrete in their relentless pursuit of a God-less reality:

“It is part of the shameless nonsense that has been the stock in trade of evolutionists from the very beginning, the guesses garnished with endless ‘perhapses … maybes … ‘ etc.”

Hunt offers a devastating critique of the breathtaking speculation that the new atheists employ:

“What the average person believes to be his or her inner motives, desires or deepest thoughts, says Dawkins and other new atheists, are really the product of evolution turning each person into a puppet of the impersonal forces of natural selection!” Hunt writes. “You think you think, but you really don’t. It’s your selfish genes doing the thinking for you, and you are a meaningless lump of protein molecules.”

In essence, Hunt points out time and again the absurd speculations and attempts at logic that are the hallmark of aggressive atheists today, who are the spiritual children of Huxley and Spencer. (By the way, Hunt’s insistence on using critical thinking skills makes “Cosmos, Creator and Human Destiny” invaluable for students, whether in Bible college or “secular” university.)

Chapter 5, “In the Beginning: The Question of Origins,” Hunt really goes after Dawkins & Co., for he virtually demands that they respond to the simple questions: Where did energy come from? Where did life originate?

Reading “Cosmos, Creator and Destiny,” one almost imagines looking right and left, right and left – as if at Wimbledon – while Hunt lobs question after question.

We, dear readers, make a mistake if we assume this is all a playground for scholars and scientists. For the questions being asked and the answers sought affect all of us. Why are we here where did we come from, and where are we going? This puzzles so many, from “the common man” to William Shatner (who has alluded to his fears of death, the unknown) to the brilliant Stephen Hawking, who struggles to present a framework for a magnificent universe that started itself.

Hunt’s meticulous research, which is legendary, is on display here as well. Writing about the first steps toward faith taken by former atheist Anthony Flew in 2004, Hunt describes the tactics employed by Flew’s former bedfellows:

“Unwilling to lose one of their most famous stars, the atheists have tried to discredit this book by Flew,” Hunt writes. “There have been suggestions that he is elderly and senile, unable to write the book himself.” Flew, however, and his publisher, HarperCollins, vigorously denied this. It is another example of the petulance of what the Bible calls fools – those who deny the Creator who gave them the breath in their bodies.

Hunt is simply brilliant in this latest book, slicing and dicing through the inane arguments of society’s most feted thinkers. Yet he does this not out of a mean spirit (something I believe he has been falsely accused of by critics, many of them in the church). Rather he does it because he has seen the confused and faith-abandoning students across the land. He has talked with the hopeless, mired in the clay of naturalism, fashioned by Darwin and his contemporaries. Theirs is a philosophy of hopelessness; Hunt offers a counterweight that is so powerfully presented in “Cosmos, Creator and Destiny” that you simply must add it not only to your library, but to your daily conversation.